Islam vs. Man's Best Friend?

Not long ago, I took my dog Shiba for an afternoon workout at our town beach on the Ottawa River, a lovely crescent of yellow sand and shade trees patronized by visitors from as far away as Montreal. A pure Siberian husky packing the energy of the Big Bang in her muscles, Shiba looks forward to these outings when she can entertain herself swimming furiously toward the horizon after lobbed twigs and tennis balls. With her striking white pelt, blue eyes, children-loving temperament and dolphin-like swimming motion, she is generally the center of attention and has made many admiring friends among the company of beach-goers.

Not everyone, however, is appreciative of Shiba’s playful and rambunctious presence. As I was about to launch another tennis ball for her to retrieve, I was approached by two attractive, deeply tanned young women who objected to Shiba’s performance, or, rather, to Shiba herself. They demanded that we cease and desist. When I inquired why I should comply, I was informed that dogs were unclean creatures and that Shiba prevented them from bathing since the water would be polluted by her thrashing about.

Needless to say, I was initially taken aback. After all, Shiba was a community favorite who posed no threat to anyone. Moreover, the women were not local residents but visitors from the big city. Additionally, my municipal taxes paid for the upkeep of the beach, which they enjoyed at no cost to themselves. The plain fact was that they had no stake in the matter and were, to put it somewhat wryly, completely out of their depth.

But, as my readers have surmised, they were of the Islamic persuasion. True, they were not garbed in traditional dress and seemed for all intents and purposes to be “modern” young women; yet they had no compunction against affirming their traditional and, indeed, alien values, which they attempted to impose as of right. I did my best to remain polite, but could not resist suggesting that they find some other beach to visit and that Shiba, whose license I had also paid for and who was more of a resident than they were, was far more entitled to the privilege of the river than interlopers from elsewhere.

As I’ve said, they had no stake in the matter. But what I was thinking was that they had no stake in the culture either. “Elsewhere” meant not only 50 miles away from the small town in which I live, but an apparently unbridgeable distance from the history of my country and the culture which had taken root on its shores over the centuries. No less than the Muslim taxi drivers in Dearborn, Michigan, who refuse to accept blind people accompanied by seeing eye dogs into their vehicles, these two young women had not only refrained from integrating sufficiently into the folkways of their adopted land but, exploiting the enclave mentality of the multicultural ideology, were convinced of their right to assert the primacy of their own norms and habits.

The BlazingCatFur website reports on another such distasteful episode. A Toronto resident walking his dog by a public park where a crowd of Muslims was celebrating Al-Quds Day found himself arrested by the police, as he writes, “for ‘offending Islam’ by walking in a PUBLIC park with my dog. Apparently, Muslims do not like dogs. I was warned by a few demonstrators not to go near them. Of course I ignored them and reminded them this is Canada, not Pakistan.” Nonetheless, the man was “dragged off and handcuffed.” The police alleged that he was “insensitive” and “inciting a riot.” “Imagine this happening in Canada?” he continues. “Walking a licensed dog on a leash at the park in front of our Provincial Legislature and being arrested for that simple act!” (The dog, incidentally, is a therapy dog of the kind we find doing their good work in hospitals.)

Canada may not be Pakistan, but it is no longer Canada. The same is the case for many other Western nations. We live in a society that is clearly and inexorably going to the dogs — though not in the honorific way in which I would like to use the phrase. And this is plainly not an issue involving merely man’s best friend. The assault on Western attitudes, ordinances, conventions, proprieties, civil codes and manners proceeds along the entire gamut of social conduct and political supposition, as the provisions of Sharia law insinuate themselves ever more intimately into daily life. We now live in a culture of fear—fear of offending and fear of violent reprisal. Admittedly, many people may bridle at the aggressive liberties that Muslim immigrant groups have taken at their expense, from the erection of mega-mosques (often in small communities), to prayer rituals in public thoroughfares, separation of the sexes in public facilities, special treatment in the schools, the regular practice of lawfare, the heavy drain on welfare entitlements, and the outrage of cordoned-off city districts or “no-go zones,” functioning as Islamic mini-republics, in places like Paris, London, Oslo and Malmo, among others. But our political and intellectual elites, whether from electoral calculations, the timidity of political correctness or sheer stupidity, have proven to be distinctly accommodating to the vehement and incendiary strangers in their midst.

The rights (and rites), long-held assumptions, common expectations, standards of behavior and time-hallowed customs we have taken for granted and which shape our communal life are undergoing a relentless erosion under the multicultural sedative that all cultures are of equal value—except our misprized and concessionary own, as it appears—and must be coddled and promoted regardless of consequence. A new imperative has been effectively announced. In a bizarre reversal of sensible usage, we—the host—must adapt to the remote, imprescriptible, and presumably exotic customs of the Islamic newcomers in our midst—the guest—rather than vice versa, as reason would dictate. The irony is that it is we who are being impounded while those who espouse an alien and often inimical value system are increasingly calling the shots.

BlazingCatFur now reports that a cyclist who attended the August 18 Al-Quds Day rally at Queen's Park in Toronto ran afoul of the constabulary and “was nearly charged with incitement to riot for merely carrying an Israeli flag.” But a child at the rally flaunting a sign “Down with Israel,” doubtlessly at his parents’ behest, is, it would seem, wholly innocuous.